Technology

We challenged ourselves to build a technology infrastructure to solve some of the most nagging problems of web development:

Large amounts of shared and densely interlinked content

Highest levels of accessibility

Support for multiple languages

Client access to content

The traditional approach to web development relies on handcrafted HTML. But because each page is coded separately, this immediately leads to quality problems; and accessibility is hard to establish and maintain. From a workflow perspective, either one person controls the content and becomes a bottleneck, or multiple team members work on the site and introduce chaos. If the site must be presented in more than one language, parts of the site rapidly get out of synch with each other.

An Edit/Preview/Publish model lets clients experiment and review without exposing work-in-progress to the outside world.

f8 for Accessibility

For most web developers, accessibility to screen readers and other adaptive technology means remembering a bunch of coding rules and using them on every page. With f8, deep support for accessibility is built right in. Because we generate all the HTML, we have a tremendous amount of control over the output. As a result, we can go well beyond Section 508 and W3C guidelines to deliver dozens of accessibility support features automatically. Here are just a few examples:

Image ALT attributes are uniformly generated. If an image contains no information of interest to screen reader software, an empty ALT attribute is added, so the screen reader will simply skip over the image instead of saying, "image. "

Stylesheet font sizes are always given in relative units - "em" or "ex" instead of "px." Why? This way, when a user with low vision increases her browser font size, all the words get bigger as expected.

Offsite link cues (like the little earths above) are auto-generated. Screen readers warn "offsite link," and the site comes up in a new window.

Tabstops for rapid screen-reader tabbing between content areas are auto-generated.

Hidden links to the main content allow screen readers to skip the (possibly voluminous) menus.

f8 for Access to Content

f8 gives clients direct access to their website content, right on the web. No more waiting for your web guy to call you back. A special version of the site highlights all the editable content, without allowing damage to the site's structure. f8's content editor offers: